Babbling Brooks

What is it about conservatives who go to work for the New York Times? Do their liberal colleagues put something in the water cooler? Is the prestige of flashing one’s NYT press card so great that the conservative editorialist lives in fear of losing his gig if he strays too far from the NYT’s implicit political mission statement (i.e., All the News that Fits Into Democratic Talking Points)? Is it a case of Stockholm syndrome?

Whatever the reason, the current conservative houseboy at the Times, David Brooks, appears to have fallen in fairly quickly with the rules governing the domestic staff. In an interview with The Atlantic (stop me if you don’t already see a problem), Brooks referred to Sarah Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”, accusing her of scorning not just liberal ideas, but of being an idea-free candidate.

After taking a sniff at his liberal nosegay to clear the thought of her from his mind, he went on to make some additional astonishing statements.

“The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there’s no time to think or make decisions [emphasis mine].” Now that’s a comforting thought; the president is supposed to have a mental template – I suppose with automatic default features – so that he doesn’t have to actually think (of course, if the occupant of the White House doesn't have time to think or make decisions, just exactly what is it he's doing in there?). But what if the template is faulty? How about if it hasn’t been updated for years? I always thought that the value of experience was its usefulness in teaching us how to think, not how to respond with canned comments like a talking Ken doll. And if this template, based on experience, is of paramount importance, what do we make of poor Joe Biden, about whom, to continue Brooks’ technology analogy, I believe we’re justified in saying that his hard drive has obviously crashed?

Well, here is what Brooks makes of Joe: “He is anything but a ‘yes’ man. [Biden] can’t not say what he thinks. There’s no internal monitor, and for Barack Obama, that’s tremendously important to have a vice president who will be that way.” Ok, hold on a minute; I’m getting dizzy. It’s important to have a mental template so that you can avoid the time-consuming exercise of thinking, unless you’re Joe Biden, who doesn’t have an internal monitor, and who should be encouraged to think (with what, may I ask?).

With respect to Obama, Brooks finds him to be “a very mediocre senator”, but surrounded by “the most impressive people in the Democratic party.” Since he doesn’t name these magnificoes, I can’t render an opinion on their impressiveness; however, maybe it doesn’t matter, because Obama has “the great intellect.” This might strike some of us as a dubious assertion, given that the senator seems to be unable to string coherent sentences together without a teleprompter, and that he hasn’t disclosed any details on his academic achievements (i.e., his GPA’s in college and law school). The basis for Brooks’ comment seems to be limited to one incident: Brooks once asked Obama if he was familiar with Reinhold Niebuhr, and Obama gave a 20-minute summary of the theologian’s worldview – according to Brooks, “a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you.” Frankly, I profess myself to be completely unsurprised that Obama would be conversant with the idea that power and corruption tend to be connected, or that he would have some knowledge of those who have cogitated upon the subject. But so great was the wonder of Brooks thereat, that he “felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.” Well, sorry to throw a wet blanket over your misfiring neurons, Mr. Brooks, but you know who else claimed to be a Reinhold Niebuhr fan? Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s intellect may leave Brooks’ leg thrashing like that of a dog getting a belly rub, but the senator’s “tremendous powers of social perception” practically give our intrepid reporter a case of the vapors. “A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama [He knows who I am! *Sigh* - P.] saying, ‘David [He called me David!], if you want to attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.” I bet they do! Why, I’ll wager that when Obama first met William Ayers, he said something like, “You probably want me to engage in radicalizing our community under the cover of education reform. Count me out!” And five minutes into the first sermon he ever heard Jeremiah Wright preach, I can imagine him nudging Michelle and whispering, “Let’s get out of here; this guy’s a nut-log.”

Brooks represents the worst of inside-the-beltway sophistry, where lofty talk about ideas quickly degenerates into “Gawrsh!-How’d-he-do-that?” admiration for the successful demonstration of intellectual prestidigitation, for gaudy frauds, for slick, but ultimately harmful, gamesmanship.

I deny that Sarah Palin is the Republican’s “fatal cancer”; however, I think it highly likely that David Brooks is, at least, its amoebic dysentery.

Update: Here's something from a fellow Brooks critic.